Hey, I've got an external hard drive that I'd like to be able to mount and unmount as a normal user. It mounts fine as root, and I can unmount as a user, but when I try mounting as a user it gives me this:

$ mount /mnt/ehdd
Error opening partition device: Permission denied
Failed to startup volume: Permission denied
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Permission denied

I've tried the 'user' and 'users' options in /etc/fstab, but it doesn't seem to work. Just for kicks, here's my fstab:

/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/sda1 /mnt/winxp ntfs-3g noauto,ro,user,dmask=000,fmask=111 1 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/ehdd ntfs-3g noauto,rw,user,dmask=000,fmask=111 1 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,users,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

If anybody had any ideas, I'd be really grateful.

Edit /etc/group

Add your regular user to plugdev, cdrom, audio, video, wheel and any other groups you want. Save. That should do it.

This may help: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html#useroption

Type the below as root then user mount should work:

Yes! It worked. I just had to set the ntfs-3g binary to setuid-root. I'm still not entirely sure what that means, though. Does having the setuid flag set make the binary run with permissions of the owner of the file, no matter who executes it? That seems kinda scary. But oh well. It works! thanks a lot.